Jeroen van Eesteren from the Remote Desktop Virtualization team posted a blog highlighting the RemoteFX-enabled certification program. It also contains a (growing) list of devices that have been certified.

Friday, December 7, 2012

After setting on High Availability for the RD Connection Broker role the RDCB HA client Access DNS name can be viewed using the Server Manager, however, this value is read-only.

In order to change this value we can use PowerShell and make use of the commandSet-RDClientAccessNameParameter Set: __AllParameterSetsSet-RDClientAccessName [[-ConnectionBroker] <String> ] [-ClientAccessName] <String> [ <CommonParameters>]

For an example how to view the current name and change it, see the powershell commands below. Note that all RD Connection broker servers have to be running in order to change this value.

The value is now successfully changed and visible in the Remote Desktop Management Service (RDMS) Server Manager Console;

It seems that this option can also be made available on RD Web Access based on Windows Server 2008 R2.The option is not there by default but can be enabled by running a patch on your RD Web Access server.

Checks the status of the RD Session Host server by using three key performance monitors that are enabled by default: the number of active sessions, the number of inactive sessions, and the total processor time per session.

When the number of active sessions approaches the performance limit of the computer's hardware, the monitor changes to a critical health state and alerts you.

When a number of inactive sessions exceeds the idle session limit field of either the Remote Desktop Services node in Group Policy or the Remote Desktop Session Host Configuration console, the monitor changes to a critical state and alerts you.

When the total processing time per session exceeds 80 percent of the CPU's total capacity for 15 minutes, the monitor changes to a critical state and alerts you.

RD Session Host server monitoring

Ensures that the Remote Desktop Services service is running, and tests for connectivity to the Remote Desktop license server and the RD Connection Broker server. It also monitors the number of open sessions and disconnected sessions.

Remote Desktop license server monitoring

Ensures that the Remote Desktop Licensing service is running, and that Remote Desktop Services client access licenses (RDS CALs) are installed and available on the Remote Desktop license server. The Remote Desktop Licensing database file is restored when there is a modification to the old database file.

RD Gateway server monitoring

Ensures that the Remote Desktop Gateway service is running, and checks that it is able to connect to the RD Session Host server. Monitors the number of current connections.

RD Connection Broker server monitoring

Ensures that the Remote Desktop Connection Broker service is running. Monitors the availability and configuration of the RD Web Access role service.

RD Web Access server monitoring

Ensures that the RD Web Access server is running. Monitors connectivity between the RD Session Host server and the RD Web Access server.

Monday, November 26, 2012

As you probably know Windows 8 does not have a classic Start Menu anymore. To replace that we now have the Modern UI Start Screen. For Windows Server 2012 this is no different. In fact, as soon as you enable the desktop experience feature on a Windows Server 2012 (RD Session Host) server the Modern UI Start Screen is launched upon logging on.

So when running Remote Desktop Services on Windows Server 2012 that raises the question, how can we control the Start Screen the way we would usually control the Start Menu up until Windows Server 2008 R2. With Windows Server 2008 R2 a method that was commonly used (although it has it’s CON’s) was the redirecting the Start Menu to a central location. And by using Access Based Enumeration on the share that hosted the Start Menu, end users would only see shortcuts they were authorized to see, based on group membership.

So, what happen if we would stick to this solution and redirect the Start Menu using the following well-known GPO setting?

This is what a new user would see upon first logon:

That’s right, a completely empty Start Screen, whoops!Why is that? This is because the Start Screen can simply not be redirected using folder redirection the way the Start Menu was redirected in Windows Server 2008 R2. Instead, what happens is the All Apps section of the Start Screen is redirected to the folder we specified in the folder redirection GPO.

As you might know you can access that by right clicking on the Start Screen (or by pressing CTRL-TAB).

Here the user is able to see shortcuts to the applications he’s authorized to.

From here, a user is able to pin the shortcuts he would like to see to his Start Screen

Using this method the end user is able to build his personal Start Screen. The fact that a user is able to customize the Start Screen to meet his needs is great. However, many users will be completely lost upon first logon when they are presented with the completely empty Start Screen.

Let’s build a configuration so that the end-users receive a default pre-defined Start Screen as a starting point at first logon and allow them to customize that to their needs by adding or removing shortcuts and adding sections to group shortcuts together.

Step 1Logon as a test user and create the Start Screen you’d like to become the default pre-defined Start Screen. Below is an example of what’s possible.

Step 2The Start Screen is stored in a binary file called appsfolder.itemdata-ms and is located in %USERPROFILE%\appdata\local\microsoft\windows\ After creating the Start Screen you want, copy this file to the following location on your RD Session Host Server(s): C:\Users\Default\appdata\local\microsoft\windows\appsfolder.itemdata-ms. If you want to save the current file make sure you create a backup of the exciting file first.

This configuration sets the basics. If a new user now logs in he’ll receive the Start Screen we’ve just created. Basically he received a copy of that file in his profile folder under: %USERPROFILE%\appdata\local\microsoft\windows

As you might have noticed, this folder is under the local section of the profile, meaning it would not roam. However, a copy of the file is created in %USERPROFILE%\ upon log off so that the file roams across different RD Session Host servers.

Also note that because we had to mark the appsfolder.itemdata-ms file in the default users profile to read-only is also marked read-only in the user profile. Meaning that changes a user makes to the Start Screen are not saved. To achieve this follow with step 4.

Step 4Create a new GPO setting on a GPO that is linked to the OU that hosts your RD Session Host servers. And create the following GPO Registry Preference.

User profile disks are for a single collection only. A user connecting to two different collections will have two separate profiles. If you want to synchronize settings, refer to Microsoft User Experience Virtualization…”

A new KB has released regarding some visual elements being incorrectly displayed when using the RDP protocol to connect to a Windows Server 2008 R2 (or Windows 7) machine.

“…Assume that you connect to a computer that is running Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 by using the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). The aspect ratio of the computer that you are connected to is displayed wider than a standard display aspect ratio (4:3) in full-screen mode on your local computer. In this situation, some visual elements are displayed incorrectly in the Remote Desktop session. For example, a file in the enhanced metafile format (EMF) cannot be displayed correctly.

This issue occurs because the GetDeviceCaps API returns the incorrect HORSIZE value and VERTSIZE value…”

Saturday, November 10, 2012

We, Kristin Griffin and Freek Berson, (Microsoft MVP’s for Remote Desktop Services), are planning on doing a series of articles focused on Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Remote Desktop Services. The series will guide you through the new features and aspects of session virtualization and VDI deployment, and we’ll talk in depth about some of the underlying technologies. It’s our goal to write an article series that you will want to read so please share your thoughts on topics you would like to see covered. On December 9th we will take your input and use it to create our series Table Of Contents.

Look for this series to start in February 2013; links to the articles will be posted on both of our blogs.

Tuesday, November 6, 2012

My new article “Distribution of Remote Apps and desktops in Windows Server 2012” just got published on VirtualizationAdmin.com

“…With the Release To Manufacturing (RTM) version of Windows Server 2012 being available (September 4th) many people have been test-driving Windows Server 2012, or will do so in the near future. Windows Server 2012 has been improved in many different areas, Remote Desktop Services being one of them. In this article, we’ll take a look at a common action while using Remote Desktop Services in Windows Server 2012, which is the distribution of Remote Apps and Desktops. In this article, we’ll discuss what has changed, what the consequences of those changes are compared to Windows Server 2008 R2, what’s possible with Windows Server 2012, and what’s not…”

Thursday, November 1, 2012

Karri Alexion-Tiernan announced today that Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) 2012 is now available for download! This also includes User Experience Virtualization (UE-V) !

“….As a quick refresher, MDOP includes six products. Its virtualization technologies help personalize the user experience, simplify application deployment and improve application compatibility with the Windows operating system, while its management technologies help to manage, monitor, deploy and repair key Windows features such as BitLocker and Group Policy. By using MDOP, IT departments are able to shift desktop repairs from reactive to proactive, save time and remove many challenges associated with troubleshooting and repairing system failures. And with 44 million licenses sold its clear businesses are finding value in the products…”

Monday, October 29, 2012

Ajay Kumar, member of the Microsoft Remote Desktop Virtualization team, created a new blog post on Single Image Management for Virtual Desktop Collections in Windows Server 2012.

“…In this blog post I will share some more details about managed virtual desktop collections and how an admin can use single Master VM to create and update hundreds of VMs in a managed virtual desktop collection (Single Image Management)…”

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

The Microsoft Remote Desktop Virtualization team did a blog post on the RD Connection Broker High Availability options in Windows Server 2012. It shows SQL Server 2012 high availability solutions to make data highly available for RD Connection Broker servers.

“…Hello, this is Jingyuan, Munindra and Sriram from the Remote Desktop Virtualization team. In our previous blog post, we described how to configure RD Connection Broker high availability in Windows Server 2012. One requirement for RD Connection Broker high availability is the use of SQL Server. In this blog post, we are going to take a step further, and show you how to leverage SQL Server 2012 high availability solutions to make data highly available for RD Connection Broker servers. The SQL Server high availability solutions we are going to cover in this blog post are: AlwaysOn Failover Cluster Instances, AlwaysOn Availability Groups and Database Mirroring…”

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

A new KB article was released to resolve an issue; in case you remotely connect to a computer that is running Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2, the Svchost.exe process for terminal services and the Lsass.exe process consumes excessive CPU resources. This issue occurs because of an infinite failure loop that occurs in the Termsrv.dll file.

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

The Microsoft Remote Desktop Virtualization Team released a new blog post containing a lot of details on the update for the Remote Desktop Client for Windows 7 updating it to the Remote Desktop Protocol 8.0 !

It also refers to a blog post by Karri Alexion-Tiernan did announcing the update later this month.

“…For businesses that have decided on VDI as the ideal solution, we have some exciting news regarding the Remote Desktop Protocol 8.0 Update for Windows 7. Once the RDP 8.0 Update is released later this month, it will apply to all Windows 7 SP1 instances; this includes your laptop or desktop device, as well as a Windows 7 SP1 virtual machines hosted in the datacenter and accessed through Microsoft VDI with Windows Server 2012. The RDP 8.0 Update will allow both the access device and the virtual machine being accessed to benefit from the same great enhancements in RemoteFX with Windows Server 2012. Additional detail about Remote Desktop Protocol 8.0 Update is available here…”

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

I received the email yesterday, my MVP status is renewed for 2012!Thanks Microsoft and everyone who made this possible, it’s an honor!

“…Dear Freek Berson,

Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2012 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in Remote Desktop Services technical communities during the past year…”

Deploying new Virtual Machines is a matter of minutes. I deployed a set of 9 virtual machines running Window Server 2012 in no time. After deployment you can immediately access and manage the VM's using RDP and the machine is also accessible using a automatically created DNS name (ending on cloudapp.net)

Before deploying the machines I created a new virtual network to allow communication between the virtual machines.

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

The Group Policy Settings Reference for Windows and Windows Server has been updated with Windows Server 2012.

The download offers Excel Sheets with all the GPO’s policies available and also contains a “Status” column to allow you to filter on New GPO settings and a “Registry information” column to get the registry equivalent of the GPO setting.

Below an overview of all the new GPO settings related to Remote Desktop Services:

Microsoft announced via windowsteamblog.com that a update will be available in Q4 of 2012 to update the Remote Desktop Client (RDC) in Windows to Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) version 8.0 allowing it to benefit from enhancements in regards to RemoteFX!

“…I frequently get asked if the enhancements we've made for Windows 8 access devices will also work on Windows 7 access devices. I am happy to share that the answer is yes, they will. In late Q4, we will deliver, via download, the Remote Desktop Protocol 8.0 Update for Windows 7, which can be applied to Windows 7 SP1 access devices, allowing them to benefit from the same great enhancements in RemoteFX with Windows Server 2012….”

Friday, September 7, 2012

You probably have been using nested RDP sessions (RDP Session initiated from another RDP session) for years, and so have I. Up until now Microsoft never officially supported this. There now is a official statement from Microsoft:

Also, the Microsoft User Experience Virtualization (UE-V) agent can npw be managed using existing Group Policy infrastructure. The UE-V ADMX template configures the synchronization settings for the UE-V agent and is also available on Connect.

For more info read these blog posts Karri Alexion-Tiernan and Stephen L Rose:

“…In summary, the Remote Desktop app offers a fresh approach for accessing your remote PCs and RemoteApp programs. Please install this free Remote Desktop app from the Windows Store and try out the new experience today. With its rich features and touch-friendly UI, we hope you will have a pleasant RemoteFX experience…”

Monday, August 20, 2012

I’m currently co-authoring a new book on Remote Desktop Services in Windows Server 2012 together with fellow RDS-MVP Cláudio Rodrigues! The book is a new release of a book Cláudio wrote earlier on Terminal Services in Windows Server 2003. We are updating the book and will be covering Remote Desktop Services (mostly Session Based Desktop Deployment) on Windows Server 2012.

We are planning to release this very soon, stay tuned for more info on the release date! A quick sneak preview of the beta edition of the book below:

Friday, August 17, 2012

A new blog post from the Microsoft Remote Desktop Virtualization team. Alvin Lau, a Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET) from the RDV Team from wrote a blog post on the Multimedia experience with RemoteFX media steaming on Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8.

“…Previously, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 introduced Windows Multimedia Redirection, which provided a great experience when playing multimedia content by using Windows Media Player (WMP) in a remote session. Since Multimedia Redirection was based on redirecting the native media stream to the client, the experience was great for supported video formats on LAN networks. However, there were a few key shortcomings…”

“…Introduction. In a previous article, I discussed how to use PowerShell to set up a basic Remote Desktop Services environment. In that article, amongst other things, we discussed how to do a quick RDS deployment, add a Session Collection and add a RemoteApp. In this article we’ll dive a little bit deeper into PowerShell for RDS to take a look at how we can even further automate the installation, configuration and maintenance of Remote Desktop Services using the new PowerShell commands available with Windows Server 2012.…”

Tuesday, August 7, 2012

A new KB article (2728032 ) was released by Microsoft yesterday related to a logged Application Crash event on every server reboot when Remote Desktop Services is installed. The issue seems to occurs if you have configured the Remote Desktop License Servers directly in the Registry. It applies to Windows Server 2008 R2. For more details taken from the KB article below

SymptomsOn a Windows Server 2008 R2, you have Remote Deskop Services (RDS) role installed, and on every server reboot you get the following Application Crash event logged:

Friday, July 27, 2012

Great announcement on the RDS blog by Shanmugam Kulandaivel, a senior program manager on the Remote Desktop Virtualization (RDV) team : Fast and fluid audio/video experience with the new Lync and RemoteFX This is great news as this covers vm-based scenarios as well as session (traditional terminal servers) !

"... One of the announcements that will particularly interest readers of this blog is the support for Lync audio and video in virtual machine-based and session-based desktop deployments. You can find more details in the section titled ‘Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Plug-in’ in this TechNet article. The RDV and Lync teams worked over the past year to help enable a seamless, fast, and fluid conferencing experience that works with the new Lync in Windows Server 2012 deployments by using RemoteFX..."

"...A key part of the new architecture is the RemoteFX Media Redirection API, which allows Voice over IP (VoIP) applications to natively integrate with RemoteFX, and enables transmission and rendering of audio and video content directly on the client side.

Some of the significant advantages of this approach include:

Audio and video performance similar to that of running Lync locally. Since a double hop of media content is avoided, even WAN users can have a great Lync conferencing experience.

Reduced bandwidth usage between the client and the data center because Lync media content is not sent from the server-based desktop anymore.

Thursday, July 19, 2012

Yesterday my article post “Using PowerShell to control RDS in Windows Server 2012” was published. That article had a focus on Session Based Deployment using PowerShell. Today Omair Gillani, a program manager on the Microsoft Remote Desktop Virtualization team published a great new post on using PowerShell for RDS as well. This post has a focus on virtual machine-based desktop deployment.

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

My new article entitled "Using PowerShell to control RDS in Windows Server 2012" on virtualizationadmin.com just got published. In this article I do dive into some of the new PowerShell commands for the Remote Desktop Services scenarios that are available with Windows Server 2012. The article discusses the installation of a RDS deployment, the creation of a Session Collection and the creation of RemoteApps. All using Powershell. I’m already working on a part II of this article in which we’ll dive even deeper. Stay tuned!

“…Introduction. PowerShell has been around for many years now. There is no way to work around PowerShell anymore, and you should not even want to work around it. With every new release of every new Microsoft product or service, we see an even tighter integration with PowerShell. With the upcoming release, it’s even bigger than before. With Windows Server 2012, we have over 2400 cmdlets available! That is a huge number! In this article, we will take a look at how PowerShell is integrated with Remote Desktop Services in Windows Server 2012. We will dive into PowerShell commands for both RDS scenarios that are available with Windows Server 2012. That is, the Virtual machine-based desktop deployment as well as the Session-based desktop deployment…”

Friday, July 13, 2012

Gaurav Daga, the Lead Program Manager on Microsoft's Remote Desktop Virtualization team did a great summary blog post containing links to all the Channel9 video’s on VDI recorded at TechEd 2012!

“…In June, Dean Paron posted two TechEd overview videos for Remote Desktop Services (RDS) in Windows Server 2012. Today’s blog post summarizes the key presentations from TechEd. We suggest you watch these presentations in the order shown so that you will go from a high-level overview of RDS to a deep technical analysis (with demos) of everything you want to know about the Microsoft Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) investments in Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8. You will also take away some general knowledge about VDI and other related desktop virtualization technologies..”

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

A new hotfix was released today regarding an issue when configuring folder redirection of the the home drive for multiple users on a DFS share in conjunction with Slow Configure slow-link mode being enabled. Apparently, the second user that logs on does not get the mapped drive

“…Consider the following scenario:

You have a client computer that is running Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 in an Active Directory domain.

You set up home folders for domain user accounts on a Distributed File System (DFS) share.

You redirect the home folders to the DFS root by configuring the Folder Redirection Group Policy setting on the server.Note You can use the %HOMEDRIVE% variable to map to the DFS root.

You use the slow-link mode for redirected folders. To do this, you enable the following Group Policy setting:Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\Network\Offline Files\Configure slow-link mode

A domain user logs on to the client computer, and then the home folder is mapped to the client computer.

The mapped home folder is configured to use slow-link mode.

A second domain user who shares the same DFS root with the previous domain user logs on to the same client computer.

In this scenario, folder redirection fails. More specifically, the home folder of the second user is not mapped to the client computer…”

Monday, July 9, 2012

We’re close to the availability of Windows Server 2012. The following was announced today:

”…we are announcing that Windows Server 2012 will be released to manufacturing in the first week of August. The code will be complete and we will begin delivering it to our hardware partners. Then, the product will be generally available to customers worldwide through multiple channels in September.

You, our customers and partners, have downloaded pre-release versions of Windows Server 2012 more than 500,000 times - more than any other server from Microsoft before. We can’t wait to get the final version out the door to you!…”